Increasingly, network functions traditionally performed by dedicated hardware devices are being virtualized and performed by a partitioned physical platform. For example, network functions such as routing, packet filtering, caching, and other network functions may be performed by multiple virtual machines executed by a single, partitioned server. The virtualization platform may include any combination of network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), and/or software-defined infrastructure (SDI). Accordingly, in such systems large amounts of data may be exchanged between virtual machines executed by a single physical platform. When managed by typical computer operating systems and/or virtual machine monitors (VMM), exchanging messages between virtual machines may require creating at least one copy of each message, which may consume platform bandwidth and/or add latency.
Typical computer processors include hardware support for virtualization operations. Software virtualization includes transparently executing one or more guest operating systems from within a host operating system or VMM. Hardware virtualization features may include an extended privilege model, hardware-assisted support for virtual memory addressing, support for extended memory permissions, and other virtualization features.